CM1 | Laura Muirhead | How to Plan the Plan

#CM1TO @LAURARONI

@ T R I B A LT O R O N T O

how to plan the plan
laura muirhead - @lauraroni
manager, community cultivation @tribaltoronto
NOVEMBER 14, 2013
#CM1TO

Wednesday, 13 November, 13

who’s this chick &
how’d she get here?


So
I’m
sure
you’re
thinking,
who’s
this
chick
and
who
did
she
get
here
today?
To
be
honest,
i
never
thought
i’d
be
knowledgeable
enough
to
be
an
expert
on
anything,
let
alone
speaking
before
you
here
today.
before i got a solid base understanding of social media marketing and community building from my time at Edelman Digital, i was just an early adopting social media user.
i’m the 4,013,616th person to ever join facebook, and i still remember when i could input my university class schedule on there to find out who else were in my classes at Western. i’m
followed by @barackobama on twitter and avid stalker of celebrity’s twitter favorites. (do they just save tweets about themselves? or things they find interesting?! i swear it’s a fascinating
pastime). i’m an obssessive tumblr reblogger and creeper. instagram, buzzfeed, worldstar, and gawker enthusiast. often gets sucked into pinterest black holes. curator of my favourite movies
and must watches on mubi.com; keeper of all the music i listen to on last.fm.
the last decade of my online life has been captured and even defined by these things. social media and community are what i know. what i’m passionate about. but it wasn’t until i started
preparing for this conference that i realized that i’ve been doing this for 17 years.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI

@ T R I B A LT O R O N T O 3

à


because i fell in love with the internet in 5th grade, when i was webmaster to a Geocities website with my best friend Marisa. anyone here had a Geocities site? awesome.
ours, placed in the Broadway/Stage/ arts and entertainment neighbourhood of Geocities, was home to our sailor moon and x ﬁles fan ﬁction, drawings, and songs, that we spent nearly every
day after school writing and perfecting.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


but while the creative output of our ‘art’ was enough for Marisa- it wasn’t for me. i quickly assumed role of webmaster, and i wanted to know who was looking at our fanﬁcs and what they were
writing too. and through rudimentary social tools like Guestbooks and Webrings, i discovered a community of nerds who too shared our interests and were also writing these bizarro world
crossover stories where Scully and Tuxedo Mask were solving Japanese alien mysteries. and they were using Yahoo! Chat, Yahoo! Groups every day after school to connect with one
another.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


after dabbling on myspace and blogspot with my tween ramblings, several years later in the early/mid-2000s, before Facebook and Twitter really took off, i found myself with an audience of
5000 people sharing, commenting and generating positive discussion on my Google Reader shared items. bizarre, right? i often wondered who would ever want to subscribe to a feed of all
the things I thought were interesting. i realized that i must have an eye for content curation, for understanding what the average, or in my case hopefully not-so-average, internet-goer wants
to see, and an innate ability to ﬁlter the noise from the signal.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


before i knew it, in both instances, i was managing a community around something or things that i passionate about. a community who had expectations that i’d continue to deliver ‘premium’
content on a consistent basis, along a consistent point of view. a community who had feedback on what i was publishing and who in turn wanted to be heard. a community who started to
appropriate and repurpose my content into their own.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


and now while many years later the platforms, my subject matter, and impetus for being a content creator have all changed, i ﬁnd myself planning for and managing communities for a living while still having an inherent fascination for how and why people use the internet to connect with the things they love. but now also with a new fascination for how we can use community
engagement to solve business problems too.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


and while my job (most days) is to ﬁgure out and advise how brands like McDonald’s Canada should communicate in social media to build relationships with their lovers and convert some
fence sitters, i can’t avoid the fact that there are plenty of haters out there of all brands, waiting to jump on any mistake or any vulnerability i - or our community cultivation team - surface. a
fact our clients are understandably, equally aware of.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


but i have to remember that the internet always does what the internet always does - appropriating and reappropriating, piling onto the tiniest sliver of “#facts” with endless parodies and
scrutiny, and repeatedly beating anything you feed it to death and that’s ok. that’s why all of us here love the internet. but we need to remember that in a business sense, this is really scary - and while our jobs as community managers is usually no
longer about convincing clients that they NEED to engage in social media, many are more interested in becoming a positive contributing member of what i like to call the ‘because internet’
things, like Nick Doge here.
it’s our job now to ﬁgure out how we protect our client’s brands in an environment that could potentially want to rip it to shreds yet still contribute something to cyberculture that people will
actually want to engage with and share. - all in the name of building meaningful connections with your customer.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI

@ T R I B A L T O R O N T O 10

“...the tyranny of
majority opinion” has
left a lot of opportunity
à
for the “great internet
eccentrics of this
Google-dominated era”
KernelMag on subculture


and now, when the cult of the amateur has taken over a lot of the mainstream online media, and major brands’ ‘real-time content marketing campaigns’ HAVE BECOME the news - it has
become imperative that we do everything we can to work with our brands’ stakeholders to give up control of our brands so that we can establish signiﬁcant online identity and credibility, in
order to make real and true cybercultural impact.

how do you plan the
community engagement
plan for modern brands?


so, knowing that there’s always the risk that the internet will appropriate and react creatively to what you put out there and many of us have very real business realities that need to be met like managing brand reputation and risk - how can you still engage people in a way native to what they expect in the social space that still shows brand value and achieves business goals,
but also manage expectations from brand stakeholders who may believe that loosening control of their brand is a massive risk? phew.
well, you start with a plan. i’m here to talk about how you plan the plan for modern brands. and instead of showing you examples, i’m going to pose a lot of questions, hopefully some you’ve
thought about and some you haven’t. but this is all intended to help inspire your process, with my insight on what i’ve seen work in action in an agency environment.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


what are you setting out to do?
who needs to àbe involved?
how do we achieve success?


i start building any community plan by guiding my exploration with these three simple questions - what are you setting out to do? who needs to be involved? how do we achieve success?
start with a core team who can determine and align on the fundamentals; engage the applicable client/brand stakeholders to get alignment; and then develop the fulsome plan. so, let’s start
with the fundamentals.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


1) fundamentals
creative vision
insights

business need
target
strategy
measurement

à

consumer want
platforms
campaigns
content


it may sound obvious, but you’ll find success if your set community objectives is where these three areas - creative vision,
business need, and consumer want - intersect. You can use this formula for your overarching community vision, the campaign
level, as well as the day-to-day level. For example, perhaps for a financial services brand, you uncover the insight that no one
really ever WANTS to hear from their bank. So perhaps instead of hitting your community over the head with detailed financial
news or market update content, you approach your brand’s content in a way so they’ll be seen as more relatable (which falls
under business need), by highlighting seasonal financial planning stories by real customers (relevant consumer want), shown in
photos with real quotes in a look and feel in line with the greater brand (creative vision).

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


1) fundamentals
creative vision
is this relevant?

business need
who do you want to talk to?
what can you do for them?
what can they do for you?
what KPIs will community
activity support?
what are your goals?

à

consumer want
where are the people we want to
engage with?
how are we going to make a
lasting impact?
is this what the people want?
will this resonate?


here’s another way to think about it. again, what i ﬁnd great about this approach for the fundamentals is that it works as well for
the biggest overall multi-platform community plans as it does at the campaign and content theme level. and these are BIG
questions. not all of them are going to be answerable from your seat as a community manager, so it’s very important to make
sure your greater team is engaged right from the start.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


2) people
committee of client stakeholders
community manager, strategist,
à
creative lead, production lead
partners, vendors, platform owners
operations lead

so, of your full team, who needs to be involved in community planning? you may get a brief from your client, you may not, but
generally speaking, your client’s marketing/brand, communications/PR, and legal/compliance teams, need alignment on the plan
and you need buy-in that it can be done and upheld on their end. there needs to be a single point of contact or committee who
can also run the plan up the ladder to the client executive team as needed. in my experience, having a community manager take
the lead on the community plan, tag-teaming with a strategist (and if you’re in an agency, the account lead), is the right
approach to getting the plan started. you need to make sure you get input from your creative lead and your production lead to
ensure that you’re not recommending something that can’t be done from either of their perspectives. it’s also important to get
alignment from agency partners or your team’s specialists on media, technology, PR, as well as get input from applicable vendors
(like OfferPop, Radian6), and platform owners (Twitter, Tumblr) to determine that what you’re recommending is possible. you
may also have an operations lead who can help make sure that you have the proper internal resources in place to make sure
you’re ready to service the community plan in the best way.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


3) the plan
research & discovery
community management guide
à

content & creative
integration & propagation
reporting

then it comes time to develop the plan. for the rest of this presentation, i’ll be going through these points as how they relate to
your community plan for one community. many components within are also transferrable to planning at the smaller campaign
level or at the bigger multi-community level, but it’s often easier to start small with one community touchpoint before diving into
planning for everything else.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


3) the plan
à

content & creative
reporting

in any case, every plan must start with research and discovery. and, in particular, discovery that leads to the answer of who you
want your community to be.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


who saw this recent news from Piper Jaffray, largely publicized on Mashable et al?
According to this study, we now apparently need to be worried that the ever-elusive millennial group has lost 10% points of
interest in Facebook in just a year. Another Piper Jaffray study says that 48% of teens own iPhones, with 62% of teens saying that
their next phone will be an iPhone. Based on this mobile-centric behaviour, some pundits are even saying that millennials are
using Twitter just like a mass group text service. According to these sources, we now need to worry about the rise of apps like
KIK whose 30 million users rely on username to username text messages to communicate with one another, without mom and
dad peering over their shoulder or stumbling across their public proﬁles. a place where marketers really can’t go.
we’re all guilty of it - looking at the study or report du jour, tweeting it and treating it as gospel until the next report comes out.
while it’s deﬁnitely important to stay abreast of trends and social platform migration for your target audience, the platform you
choose to set up your community should be chosen for what’s right for who you want to be and what you want to say. period. but
how do you cut through all the noise out there about what and where you should be, what’s next, and what you should be saying?

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


find the truth through listening.
à


find the truth through listening to who you want to be reaching. start with conducting a listening audit - which i’m sure is no
surprise here for this group. but what may be surprising is what i suggest your audit contains.
yes, you want to get a sense of existing conversation volume, context, and sentiment across your brand, brand assets/attributes
and your competitors. but the real value comes from going one step further. dig into the other connections that your brand
advocates and detractors have. what activities and interests do they have affinity for? do they reference your brand in ‘need
states’ - i want this brand, i hate this brand, i feel X for this brand. what’s their voice? what language do they use? where do they
share? how do they share? what do they share?
you need to know all of this to know how you can be relevant and resonating with your own communities and content you
release out there to inspire these people to talk about, in the way you want them to talk about it. you need to understand the
culture and behaviour behind the action before you can properly plan for it, and ultimately be successful. generally, i like to
distill these findings into a series of slides, “they ARE this, they AREN’T that.” “they DO this, they DON’T DO that.” and use these
findings to properly inform communications strategy.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


3) the plan
à

content & creative
reporting

next step for the plan - developing a community management guide. this is a community benchmark document to be used as
the starting place for alignment across all stakeholders, internally and with your client about all the governance principles for
your community activity. it’s also where you can establish your content strategy and creative look & feel.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


determine your sandbox to play in.
à


the ﬁrst thing that should go in your Guide is determining your sandbox to play in. beyond complying with the governing bodies
for the type of work we do - like WOMMA, ASC and so on - there could be regulatory bodies governing the particular industry
your brand resides within. and there could be very real mandatories for how you go about engaging in social media, how you talk
about products and services, and even what kind of communities you’re able to create or engage in.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


your next step for your Guide is to align on how to determine response for various types of comments from your community. and
along with including community Terms of Use (like, ‘we will delete posts that are repetitive, including links, or are discriminatory
in nature’) and boilerplate contest rules and regulations (for when the opportunity arises), you should create a customized
comment moderation workflow that’s specific to your client’s risks and threats, so the expectation can be set across all levels especially Legal and Customer Service - for what you will and won’t respond to or delete.
also important to consider here are scenario plans - if person says X, we’ll respond with Y. if a person of influence or from this
stakeholder group says X, we’ll respond with Z, and so forth. this kind of planning can also come in handy if you’re ever faced
with an escalated issue or crisis and need to act fast.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


but back to moderation, this is a great example from my colleagues out at Tribal Vancouver of how customizing one of these
moderation decision trees can really help you pinpoint your brand’s voice. here, you can see that they’ve set an expectation with
their client that if they receive a comment like ‘I effin love your brand!’ that they would keep that comment visible because it’s
relevant, even though profane.
lastly, another governance consideration - settle on if you need legal lines attached to your content, a retweet/reblog policy, as
well as an understanding of what kinds of third-party sites you’re allowed to link to for content. this all goes back to lifting some
of the brand’s control, and allowing for user-generated or external content to help tell your brand’s story. in my experience,
many clients - and their legal teams - have varying expectations as to what’s acceptable for all of these, so that’s reason alone to
ensure you’ve covered it off.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


?
à


ok, so now you know what you have to do for initial community setup, but who are you going to be and what are you going to
talk about? and how are you going to talk about it?
start with thinking about if there’s a celebrity, TV host, musician or public figure who can be the type of voice and personality
you want to achieve. or maybe there’s another brand, or news outlet that might be a better voice fit. from here, start to plan out
how this person’s voice would talk about key topic areas important to your/your client’s business, and also how they’d just carry
on a typical conversation. the trickiest part of this exercise is thinking about how this person would talk about deals or
promotions - like, how would a go-getter like Kanye describe a Facebook Offer? it’s a fun exercise that you should engage your
creative minds in for finding a solution that upholds the creative vision for the brand’s activities in social.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


once i’m comfortable for where the voice and identity have landed, i like to gather the people who all touch the brand for a
content brainstorm. depending on what kind of planning your client/brand has, you might only be able to brainstorm content
buckets - otherwise known as high level generalities for which content can fall within - like, ‘thought leadership’, ‘product facts’,
‘conversational’. or, you might have access to a marketing calendar, or a media plan so you might be able to take this a step
further, where you can strategically identify what you’re going to support, and the ways in to supporting it - like, will you create
an infographic to explain how that thing works, or is it better as a whitepaper? after brainstorming a whackload of themes and
formats, it’s important to critically evaluate each of them, and understand how they can work together to strategically uphold the
fundamentals and maintain a good balance about talking about yourself and upholding relevance for your community’s fans.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


Identity - “This expresses my identity better than I can.” “This
explains part of your identity that I don’t really understand.”
Emotional Gift - “This made me feel X; I’d like you to feel X.” “I
heard you’re feeling Y; I’d like you to feel X.”
à
Information - “Here is something that supports a view I already
have.” “I would like you to know that this information is important
to me.”


and in the name of maintaining relevance for your community members - and to attract new ones - i’m a big fan of ensuring that
every bit of our communication upholds at least one of these sharing principles, that the team at Buzzfeed ﬁrst formalized.
getting alignment on these helps contextualize your social content point of view to your client, and helps start pave the way for
considering real-time content opportunities as an organization - because if there’s a clear way into the bigger conversation
external to your brand, it becomes a lot less lofty an activity in your client’s eyes, and for your team too.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


and lastly, in your Community Management Guide, you need to get your creative lead to align on the creative look and feel for
your community. your brand might have a brand guidelines book to pull info from, but if not, your look and feel should be
consistent across your social platforms, and there should be a creative vision that all assets uphold. at the very least, you’ll need
to align across your teams on things like do you need logos on your creative? or, give consideration to episodic content - is there
a watermark or visual cue that is consistent across themed assets? legal will also likely want to weigh in here with their
expectations, for example if copyright symbols or legal lines are needed on copy and assets.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


3) the plan
à

content & creative
reporting

Ok, so now that you’ve gone through your discovery, governance, and creative explorations, two additional important elements
to your community plan are ﬁguring out where in your digital ecosystem your community or communities ﬁt and what kind of
distribution methods you’ll employ to make sure that the right people are seeing what you want them to see. on integration,
make sure you give long consideration to how these communities will be integrated with your brand’s website, other social
properties, in-store, PR efforts, and even things like end frames on TV spots or lockups in print. moreover, think about what
these communities’ functions are in the consumer journey - like, is your Facebook page for existing customers or lovers of your
brand, but your paid search campaign is for potential ones? - sounds simple enough, but this is a key directional point to ensure
that your content and campaigns stay on the right strategic track. and that you are prepared for giving the right people the right
level of control of your brand.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


paid media
earned opportunities
à
seeding/syndication
reprisal/repurpose


on propagation, i sometimes hear things like, ‘social media is where good content goes to die.’ - but it doesn’t have to be.
whenever i deliver a plan, i make sure i cover at least two of these four points to extend the life of community content and
campaign, but also because without a fulsome distribution plan, it begs the age-old question, ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no
one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’
i think many of us can agree that paid media promotion is a surefire way to inspire engagement and acquisition for your
communities, so it’s important to consider what you will need in hard costs to achieve your client’s goals. for some communities,
like on Facebook, you have to battle an algorithm that’s designed to only surface ‘relevant’ content unless it’s sponsored and
pushed into news feeds of your target demographic. i’m a big fan of figuring out key target profiles for an always-on paid media
strategy for the communities i manage, as i find targeting people who self-identify as having affinity for interests similar to those
of my brand helps protect the brand from the risk of blanketing paid messages to anyone who’ll have them, in the name of reach
and frequency. and, if you’re able to pinpoint your target groups in advance and are able to quantify them through the help of
the platform’s representatives, you’ll be able to measure how well you’re keeping to your strategy, and hopefully engaging and
converting that audience into customers too.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


à


anyone recognize this? this is a spot-on sponsored post that appeared in The Onion for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, an all-inone digital marketing solution, which pokes fun, using the Onion tone, at this common propagation tactic. i quote, “the post will
take everything you like about this website’s regular content and slap our company’s logo and corporate voice all over it. This is
a great idea. People will love this, right?” combined with the digital ad placement, asking readers if they know what their
marketing is doing, it’s pretty powerful stuff for us marketing types. for me, it reminds me that when it comes to doing
sponsored anything properly, it becomes of a question of, how can you help each other? ﬁnd out who would be innately
interested in your client’s message and ﬁgure out if you can co-create something together - whether that’s something as simple
as a giveaway or more intricate like a content partnership with paid contextual advertising. asking someone to cover something
for free without anything ‘in it’ for them, is a thing of the past.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


seed, but allow time for
à
organic discovery


but, understanding that not every client or program is always able to lean on paid distribution models, there are plenty of ways
you can help inspire virality of what you’re trying to share- through seeding. if you’ve got some impactful campaign videos or
images to share, look at uploading to and engaging with the Reddits, Devours and Imgurs of the world. if your content is longform text by an expert, consider guest blogging, or exploring posting directly to article directories (ehow, Squidoo) or packaging
up some articles for content hubs like Huffington Post or The Loop to run with. OR, ﬂex your creative muscle and extend the life
of your content or campaign through repackaging for other platforms, like Tumblr or Buzzfeed. In all instances, it’s important to
a) disclose your relationship with the content or brand and b) don’t just drop in whenever you have something to push out, but
be a functioning member of those communities on your brand’s behalf, where you can. and, a good rule of thumb, allow your
program a few days or a week to see if it organically appears on any of these aforementioned channels, as it will resonate a lot
more with your intended audience if someone ‘like them’ shared it, instead. worst case, if you’re not thrilled with how content or
campaigns performed the ﬁrst time, but there are key assets that generated some interest, consider how you can bring it back
later, or at least some key elements. could that YouTube video become a composite, pic-stitch image for your Twitter followers?
or a great moment within that same video could become a reaction GIF for Tumblr? these well-tagged new assets also become
things you can seed as traffic drivers to your desired social destination.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


3) the plan
à

content & creative
reporting

lastly, reporting. we all know which social engagement metrics are the ones that tell the best story about your community’s
health and content resonance (meaning, which content areas need to be elevated or dropped depending on response). some of
you might be able to tell me what your social media activity’s Key Performance Indicators are, and how you use social data to
feed into the acceleration of those measurements and your client’s business overall. depending on who your client is and where
in the organization they sit will depend on if they want to know about the minutia or just an executive summary. but ultimately
there’s just one question that, if you can prepare an answer for any given time, will be crucial to opening the conversation about
managing or extending your social presence -

#CM1TO @LAURARONI


what have you learned from the
community and how is our
business going to change
à
because of what you learned?


what have you learned from the community and how is our business going to change because of what you learned? because
really, if you can’t demonstrate a community’s value for the business, why are you there? further, how are you going to provide
your community members what you’ve learned they want through insight, or speciﬁcally what they’re asking for? how are you
going to feed these learnings back into your agency or client organization and inspire real change for future everything?
hopefully some of that change also means giving up brand control so you can create one-to-one relationships with your lovers
and give them the tools they need to build a meaningful connection with your brand.
answering these questions and doing the work is of course up to you, but i can tell you that it all starts by having a plan.

#CM1TO @LAURARONI

thank you. questions?


@ T R I B A LT O R O N T O

CM1 | Laura Muirhead | How to Plan the Plan

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